Weekly Poll: Do You Use Dashboard?

The Dashboard seems in many ways to be a ghost of OS X past, but the version in Mountain Lion has enough iOS-style tweaks to make it seem like Apple’s going to keep it around. There’s a number of ways you can still put Dashboard to use, even today, and the built-in widgets and Safari web clips can make it quite useful.

Back in 2011, Josh asked if you still use Dashboard, and just under half of our readers said they don’t use it. I’d figure less of us use it today in 2013, but was curious to see.

So: do you still use Dashboard? If so, what widgets do you still use? I’m still using it for the Stocks and weather widgets, as well as Safari web clips myself.

Related Posts

Popular Posts

Jeremy

Never saw the point. Saw very few widgets even remotely worth using.

http://www.thepapermail.com Jacob Penderworth

Some things took advantage of it, but Dashboard held kind of a mix between full app and mini-app. I still use it for converting units and tracking packages. Not often enough to say it’s worth keeping it in the OS though.

http://www.strshp.com Prescott Perez-Fox

I literally have two widgets — Calendar and Weather. Everything else seems to have found it’s place elsewhere. Although I do miss the Google Analytics widgets that I would use for my various sites. The API changed, or something, and they stopped working.

Being in South Africa, I often use the unit converter to Convert US Dollars to Rands and visa-versa. Also have 2 clock widgets set to various timezones, so I don’t miss international events, such as Apple announcements.

A calculator, weather, download calculator and Lorem text generator make up my other widgets.

Brandon

I actually went out of my way to disable the dashboard entirely in the hopes of freeing resources…

Simon

Here’s how it’s disabled in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Carl

Yes quite often…. screenshot plus..ical events, currency convertor, stickies , wikipeda, the dictionary widget, a scientific measurement convertor…… really for anything that i do not use regularly enough to waste one my my precious simple keyboard short cuts or for the things that i use so little that i can not even remember the shortcut… also handy to keep the browsers uncluttered. But agree on old macs with little Ram (less than 1 or 2 gig) Dashboard can be a resource Hog

http://iynque.com iynque

Dashboard looked really cool, and I used to use a few widgets all the time. Then I noticed the system resources it was consuming… Then the widgets stopped getting updates and then stopped working entirely.

Now, sadly, I have it completely disabled (via the terminal command above, in fact) to save some resources. Lightweight, single-use apps are incredibly popular, but apparently not in Dashboard form.

blawbair

I use it for viewing the tv guide, weather, computer stats and from time to time for tracking packages or putting the computer to sleep after a set time.

Iaian7

I used to write my own widgets all the time for batch processing files with command line tools. Unfortunately, OSX Mountain Lion killed file system access, and nothing works anymore. I swear, Apple is TRYING to get pro users to switch to Windows.